PERSPECTIVES: RECEPTION IN CONTEXT

PERSPECTIVES: RECEPTION IN CONTEXT

After a decade when reception analysis has developed new theoretical and methodological approaches to the field, at present there is a call for consolidation, both through more focused empirical projects and through reconsideration of the place of reception in the communication process as a whole. With respect to further empirical research, at least three types of endeavor suggest themselves. First, there is a need to build a cumulative research tradition of reception analysis, replicating as well as differentiating the relatively few and small studies so far. As part of this effort, it will be fruitful to undertake multimethod studies combining several forms of scholarship (qualitative and quantitative; theoretical, empirical, and historical), perhaps in research groups, since it is the field rather than the individual researcher that is interdisciplinary. The aim would be to consider concretely the complementarity of different modes of inquiry also at a meta- theoretical level, with reception serving as a test case that has implications for the field generally (Jensen and Rosengren, 1990).

Second, comparative studies across cultures lend themselves particularly well to qualitative, contextualized observation and interaction with audience respondents (Liebes and Katz, 1990; Lull, 1988a). It is far from well understood how the reception and everyday uses of mass communication enter into the specific social practices of different cultural and historical contexts. Qualitative methodologies, in the process, may also serve to assess the degree to which dominant research designs, most of which embody a specific form of Western rationality, apply meaningfully to the reception and impact of media

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in other cultures. Third, because mass media are increasingly interrelated, both institutionally and through their discursive forms, it will be important in the future to study the social contexts of media use as whole media environments (for a research survey and discussion of this development, see Jensen, forthcoming). The mass media exert whatever impact they have, not singly but in concert, in ways that require contextual and discursive modes of analysis. As the “what” (the object of analysis) of mass communication research and, perhaps, the “why” (the knowledge-interests) change, then so may the “how” (Lang and Lang, 1985).

Furthermore, reception analysis, in referring to the dual, social and discursive nature of communication, has identified an important area of further theory development. Beyond a conception of the social structures in which media and audiences are embedded, and of the sociocultural identity and subjectivity of media users, a comprehensive theory of communication requires a third element: namely, a theory of discourse which can account for the role of different media (print, aural, visual), genres, and other specific forms of representation in processes of reception and impact. Much theoretical work remains to

be done on the specific interconnections between the social and discursive domains of analysis for a social semiotics of mass media to be realized (see Chapter 1).

In the end, politicians, programmers, and probably the public will want to know whether and how the mass media do have effects. Reception analysis, in accounting for the conditions and processes of meaning production, may offer part of the answer. In response to a recent trend in research which exults, echoing a postmodernist position, that media discourses are open or polysemic and may be opposed by audiences who thus become powerful cultural agents (see especially Fiske, 1987; for a critique, see Jensen, 1991), it is important to specify the social level at which such opposition may be enacted. One should recognize, of course, the general finding of reception analysis that audiences reconstruct the meaning of media discourses, to a degree asserting their opposition or difference in discursive terms. But, whether this discursive difference will make a social difference in terms of cognition or action depends crucially on the given historical and cultural context: the genres of communication and their implied social uses, the interpretive repertoires of the audience, and the social reality of institutions that persists outside of reception. The meaning of mass communication as received is constantly in question; so are

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its social implications. How discursive difference may become social difference is perhaps the key question for further theoretical as well as empirical work on the audience.

It may be surprising to learn in Table 7.3 that respondents associated the super theme of class with the story of Danish medieval ballads. To explain, the news text mentioned that the ballads were written by itinerant bards and not by noblemen, as had previously been thought. This was interpreted by several respondents as an indication of how class differences influence the way history is written. Like news and other stories, then, history may be seen as a construction. Whether this implies a reconstruction of history in the future by the audience- public, is indeed the question.

Chapter 8

Media audiences Communication and context: ethnographic perspectives on the media audience

David Morley and Roger Silverstone